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Bill’s Turn at Bat

So it turns out that Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio, who’s campaigning for mayor on a promise to de-Bloomberg Gotham, do have something in common.

Both men, who grew up in the Boston area, threw caution to the wind and admitted while running for mayor of New York that they were Red Sox fans.

Once elected, Bloomberg quickly switched his allegiance, buying eight season tickets to the Yankees and four to the Mets, but de Blasio is a Fenway Park acolyte — something his rivals are mocking him for.

Any little thing will help now because, in the wildest and most whiplash-prone Democratic mayoral primary ever, the spotlight has finally swung to de Blasio, who has knocked off Christine Quinn as the clear front-runner, a perch she briefly scrambled back onto after Anthony Weiner had knocked her off.

The 52-year-old public advocate has spent the last few days surrounded by the liberal glitterati of New York: Cynthia Nixon and her wife; “Boardwalk Empire” king Steve Buscemi; and ping-pong queen Susan Sarandon, who said she decided not to support Quinn because “you can’t just vote your vagina.”

At the Good Stuff Diner in Greenwich Village on Monday, de Blasio and his wife, Chirlane McCray, sat down to talk, pleased that they were no longer “laboring in the vineyard,” as the candidate dryly put it.

Asked why Quinn was not rallying women, McCray, a mother of two, replied: “Well, I’m a woman, and she’s not speaking to the issues that I care about, and I think a lot of women feel the same way. I don’t see her speaking to the concerns of women who have to take care of children at a young age or send them to school and after school, paid sick days, issues in the workplace — she’s not speaking to any of those issues. What can I say? And she’s not accessible, she’s not the kind of person that I feel that I can go up and talk to and have a conversation with about those things, and I suspect that other women feel the same thing that I’m feeling.”

Last spring, McCray did an interview with Essence magazine about her feelings about being a black lesbian who fell in love with a white heterosexual, back in 1991, when she worked for the New York Commission on Human Rights and wore African clothing and a nose ring and he was an aide to then-Mayor David Dinkins. With her husband, she was also interviewed by the press in December and was asked if she was no longer a lesbian, and she answered ambiguously: “I am married. I have two children. Sexuality is a fluid thing, and it’s personal. I don’t even understand the question, quite frankly.”

But a lot has happened since then in this campaign season of interesting sexual proclivities and possible firsts. Besides the woman who wants to be the first first lady who used to be a lesbian, there is also Kim Catullo, the wife of Quinn, who would be the first first lady who is a married lesbian.

Photo

Credit
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Then there is the perverse Carlos Danger who wants to be the first mayor who plastered pictures of his privates online.

The summer has been so drenched with the unthinkable and the unorthodox that the de Blasios, married for 19 years, seem quite conventional by comparison.

Over coffee, they talked about a road trip they took to Niagara Falls last year which was, de Blasio said, “a total blast,” about bowling and basketball and how McCray did not like “Django Unchained” because it was too violent and about the positive reaction to ads featuring their 15-year-old son Dante, showing off the ’fro he has sported since third grade. His father warns in one ad that “someday” Dante will be stopped and frisked.

Quinn is unable to get traction, even with women, despite talking more freely about the historical nature of her bid to become the first woman and lesbian to be mayor, and the showcasing of her shy wife, a corporate lawyer who would prefer to live on a Vermont goat farm. Kim gave interviews revealing that Chris had received death threats for being gay and arguing that her image as a bully is not fair, noting that Chris never wins arguments at home.

Quinn’s message has been anodyne and poll-tested; the speaker of the City Council has somehow managed to reap the downside of her partnership with Bloomberg but not capitalize on the upside; she has left many people confused about where she stands and irritated with her role as lackey to Bloomberg’s nanny.

“What she did giving Bloomberg a third term in a back-room deal was morally and politically unacceptable,” de Blasio said.

It doesn’t help that Bloomberg himself yearns for stronger candidates. As Ken Auletta reports in The New Yorker, the mayor in June “was sympathetic to an effort by some of his supporters to draw Ray Kelly into the race” and secretly paid for a survey by his own pollster to help convince the police chief he could win.

De Blasio, in contrast to Quinn, has a consistent and strong, if hard left, message: If you didn’t like the last 12 years of New York as a luxury product, elect me.

Bloomberg proponents warn it will lead back to the days of stabbings, muggings, and “No radio in car” signs.

De Blasio rebuts that Bloomberg should not have “doubled down on stop-and-frisk and become a fearmonger.”

“I remember,” he said, smiling as he sipped his iced cappuccino, “when this same mayor was a breath of fresh air after Giuliani.”

Correction: August 22, 2013

Maureen Dowd’s column on Wednesday misquoted the response of Chirlane McCray, the wife of New York City’s public advocate, Bill de Blasio, to a question about the City Council speaker, Christine Quinn, who like Mr. de Blasio is seeking the Democratic nomination for mayor.

Ms. McCray said: “Well, I’m a woman, and she’s not speaking to the issues that I care about, and I think a lot of women feel the same way. I don’t see her speaking to the concerns of women who have to take care of children at a young age or send them to school and after school, paid sick days, issues in the workplace — she’s not speaking to any of those issues. What can I say? And she’s not accessible, she’s not the kind of person that I feel that I can go up and talk to and have a conversation with about those things, and I suspect that other women feel the same thing that I’m feeling.”

Ms. McCray did not say: “She’s not the kind of person I feel I can go up to and talk to about issues like taking care of children at a young age and paid sick leave.”

In addition, the column misstated the place where the interview occurred. It was the Good Stuff Diner, not the Good Times coffee shop, in Greenwich Village.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 21, 2013, on Page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Bill’s Turn At Bat. Today's Paper|Subscribe